The Other Hiroshimas: A Review of Napalm: An American Biography

Fire-weapons have been used from ancient times. Napalm-like weapons were used
by and against the Romans and Greeks. One term used for them was "wildfire";
another was "Greek fire", as incendiaries were widely used by the
Greeks. Some ships were equipped to shoot other vessels with flaming oils emitted
from tubes in their bows. Individual soldiers were equipped with flaming oils
that they could shoot through reeds in a kind of fire-breath. But the use of
incendiaries declined as longer-range projectiles were created, such as rockets
(e.g. the British rockets mentioned in the US national anthem).Incendiaries
were always regarded with particular awe and horror, as they invoked the terrors
of hell and being burned to death.

As the ability to project incendiaries over long ranges increased in the 19th
century, the weapon again came into use. The major turning point that would
see an unprecedented rise of fire-weapons was World War II. With Germany leading
the way, Japanese and British forces also used incendiaries to devastating effect,
but the weapon would be taken to new heights by the United States. Initially,
US officials said they wanted to avoid the "area bombing" – killing
everyone in a large area – that was being carried out by the above groups on
various cities. But soon they abandoned this approach and embraced the method.
Wanting to further increase their ability to destroy large areas, and with particular
regard to the wooden cities of Japan (66), the US Chemical Warfare Service assembled
a team of chemists at Harvard to design an incendiary weapon that would be optimal
for this goal.

As the team progressed in its development, the military built replicas of German
and Japanese civilian homes – complete with furnishings, with the most attention
devoted to bedrooms and attics – so that the new weapon, dubbed "napalm"
(a portmanteau of chemicals napthenate and palmitate) could be tested. In all
of these replica structures, which were built, burnt, and rebuilt multiple times,
only civilian homes were constructed – never military, industrial, or commercial
buildings (stated multiple times, e.g. 37). In 1931, US General Billy Mitchell,
regarded as the "founding inspiration" of the US Air Force, remarked
that since Japanese cities were "built largely of wood and paper",
they made the "greatest aerial targets the world has ever seen. … Incendiary
projectiles would burn the cities to the ground in short order." In 1941,
US Army chief of staff George Marshall told reporters that the US would "set
the paper cities of Japan on fire", and that "There won’t be any hesitation
about bombing civilians" (66). While napalm was first used against Japanese
troops in the Pacific Islands, the campaign of "area bombing" of Japanese
civilians was led by a man with the "aura of a borderline sociopath"
who had, as a child, enjoyed killing small animals (70): Curtis LeMay. LeMay
said the goal was for Japanese cities to be "wiped right off the map"
(74). To this effect, on March 9, 1945, the US "burned a flaming cross
about four miles by three into the heart" of Tokyo, which crew information
sheets said was the most densely populated city in the world at the time: 103,000
people per square mile. In the first hour, 690,000 gallons of napalm were used.
The city was essentially undefended. Japanese fighters, mostly unable to take
flight, did not shoot down a single US aircraft, and air-defense batteries were
defunct.

By the next morning, fifteen square miles of the city center were in ashes,
with approximately 100,000 people dead, mainly from burning. Streets were strewn
with "carbonized" figures and rivers were "clogged with bodies"
of people who had tried to escape the firestorms. The text contains numerous
descriptions and survivors’ accounts, but here I’ll just mention one: A survivor
saw a wealthy woman in a fine, gold kimono running from a firestorm. The winds,
which reached hundreds of miles per-hour, whipped her high into the air and
thrashed her around. She burst into flame and disappeared, incinerated. A scrap
of her kimono drifted through the air and landed at the feet of the survivor.

On the US end, multiple bombers reported vomiting in their planes from the
overpowering smell, blasted skyward by the windstorms, of "roasting human
flesh" – a sickly "sweet" odor (81).

In Washington, Generals congratulated each other. General Arnold cabled LeMay
that he had proved that he "had the guts for anything." Mission commander
Power boasted that "There were more casualties than in any other military
action in the history of the world." Neer says this assessment is correct:
this was the single deadliest one-night military operation in the world history
of warfare, to the present (83).

Some 33 million pounds of napalm were used in the campaign overall, with 106
square miles of Japan’s cities burned flat. 330,000 civilians are estimated
to have been killed, with burning "the leading cause of death". Chief
of Air Staff Lauris Norstad said the destruction was "Nothing short of
wonderful" (84).

After both atomic bombings (which, individually, inflicted less damage than
the March 9 Tokyo area-firebombing), and after the Japanese surrender, but before
it had been officially accepted, General Hap Arnold called for "as big
a finale as possible." Accordingly, 1,014 aircraft were used to further
"pulverize Tokyo with napalm and explosives". The US did not incur
a single loss in the raid (85).

Japan’s best ability to attack the US mainland was seen in its hanging of bombs
from balloons and drifting them into the eastward Jetstream. The Japanese government
thus managed to kill five people in Oregon.

While the atomic bomb "got the press", American napalm was thus established
as the truly "most effective weapon". While each atomic bombing cost
$13.5 billion, incinerating cities with napalm cost only $83,000 "per metropolis"
– relatively speaking, nothing. Napalm was now understood by the US military
as the real bringer of "Armageddon", and was then used accordingly
in its next major military campaigns in foreign countries.(North America and
Australia remain the only two continents where napalm has never actually been
used on people. It has been used by many other militaries, largely US clients,
but no one has used it to the extent of the United States [193]).

While the text continues tracing the use of napalm up to the present, the sections
on the development of napalm and then its first major use, on Japan, are the
most powerful – even though, after determining napalm’s power, the US used it
more extensively on Korea and Vietnam (in the latter case, mostly, as the author
notes, in South Vietnam, where there was no opposing air-force or air-defense).
I think this is somewhat intentional, since part of the author’s goal, I argue
below, is to justify the US’s use of napalm. This is much easier to do regarding
WWII, as it is overwhelmingly interpreted by Americans as a "good war"
and thus requires no justification, whereas the selectively "forgotten"
Korean war or the often shame-invoking Vietnam war require historical manipulations
or omissions to make US actions at least semi-thinkable. So, from here I will
give a broader summary and critique of the book.

One important theoretical and historical argument that the author makes is
that while there was virtually no American opposition to the use of napalm in
WWII or against Korea (indeed, there was celebration; in WWII, the press did
not even mention human victims in its initial reports of the raids, only property
damage [82]), in the course of the Vietnam war, massive disgust and opposition
resulted from the US’s widespread use of the incendiary chemical concoction.
(During the Korean war, there was foreign opposition to the US’s use of napalm
to incinerate Korean cities. Even Winston Churchill, who oversaw the brutal
torture or killing of millions of people elsewhere, such as in India, remarked
that the US’s napalm use was "very cruel": the US was "splashing
it all over the civilian population", "tortur[ing] great masses of
people". The US official who took this statement declined to publicize
it [102-3].) Because of concerted opposition to napalm and corporations (particularly
Dow Chemical) that produced napalm for the military, the gel became regarded
as a "worldwide synonym for American brutality" (224).Neer asserts
that a reason for this is that "authorities did not censor" during
the Vietnam war to the extent that they did "during World War II and the
Korean War" (148). Images of children and others horrifically burnt or
incinerated by napalm therefore became available to the public and incited people
like Dr. Bruce Franklin and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to engage in group
actions to stop the war and the use of napalm. What this says about the effectiveness
of imagery and government and corporate control of imagery, and information
generally – and about Franklin’s observation that censorship was increased in
response to opposition to the Vietnam war (Vietnam and Other American Fantasies)
– may be disquieting.

However, Neer points out (and in part seems to lament), the image of napalm
was never salvaged, except for within a sub-group of personality-types (in this
text limited to the rabble) who had always enthusiastically supported its use,
referring to its Vietnamese victims in racist and xenophobic terms such as "ungodly
savages", "animals" (130), etc., or with statements such as "I
Back Dow [Chemical]. I Like My VC [Vietcong] Well Done" (142).These kinds
of statements were often embarrassing to corporate and government officials
who tried to defend their use of the chemical on "humanitarian" and
other such grounds, in apparent contrast to the low-brow rabble that simply
admitted it liked the idea of roasting people alive. When W. Bush used napalm
and other incendiaries against personnel in his invasion of Iraq, initiated
in 2003, the weapon’s reputation was then such, on balance, that the administration
at first tried to deny that it was being used (e.g. 210). In academic biographies
of the main inventor of napalm, Louis Fieser, Neer notes that the fire-gel goes
mysteriously unmentioned.

Attention on napalm due to American use of it in Vietnam resulted in multiple
experts and expert panel assessments of the weapon, and the issue was repeatedly
raised in the UN General Assembly – which, since the Korean War and the rise
of the decolonization climate, had drifted increasingly away from purely Western
colonial, American-led control. (During the Korean War, China had not been admitted
to the UN and the USSR abstained from participation [92].) In 1967, Harvard
Medical School instructor Peter Reich and senior physician at Massachusetts
General Hospital Victor Sidel called napalm a "chemical weapon" that
causes horrific burns, and said it is particularly dangerous for children and
has a devastating psychological clout. They said doctors should familiarize
themselves with napalm’s effects (133). In 1968, the UN General Assembly voted
in favor of a resolution deploring "the use of chemical and biological
means of warfare, including napalm bombing" (175).In 1971, the UNGA called
napalm a "cruel" weapon. In 1972, it again overwhelmingly approved
a resolution deploring the use of napalm "in all armed conflicts",
noting it regarded the weapon "with horror" (178).An expert panel
agreed, calling napalm a "savage and cruel" "area weapon"
of "total war" (176). The United States abstained from or opposed
all of these overwhelmingly approved resolutions.

While napalm ultimately lost the battle for public opinion, its use today is
only technically outlawed against civilians and civilian areas – an agreement
reached in 1980 and finally ratified by the US, with self-exceptions of dubious
legality, in 2009.

While the text is highly informative and readable, my main critique is that
as it presents the reality of napalm and its use, it drifts – seemingly out
of nationalistic necessity – into a partisan defense of the United States. My
problem with this is that Neer does not state this position outright but argues
it implicitly, through omission. Regarding WWII, defending US actions requires
little work. Most people who would read this book, including myself, know that
the crimes committed by Germany and Japan were perpetrated on a scale far vaster
than the violent actions carried out by the US at the time. However, there is
an interesting point within this observation, which Neer should be commended
for not necessarily shying away from: if we imagine a parallel situation of
a group attacking a second group that a) militarily attacked the first group
and b) is universally recognized for performing terrible acts, it does not mean
the first group is angelic and thereafter morally justified in anything it wants
to do. (An example to illustrate the parallel might be Iran’s anti-ISIS campaign,
which Iran is using in ways similar to how the US uses WWII, to legitimate itself
and justify subsequent actions.) The first group, even if less criminal, can
still be incredibly brutal, and can easily issue self-serving justifications
(such as expediency, "humanitarianism", etc.) for its brutality. This
is a dynamic that may be illustrated in, for example, the fact that the US’s
March 9 attack on Tokyo was and remains the single deadliest one-night act of
war in world history. Germany and Japan were far worse overall at the time,
but this does not mean the people in the US administration were Gandhi, or that
everything the US did should be celebrated or issued blanket justification.
Robert McNamara, for example, LeMay’s top lieutenant in WWII and later architect
of the efficiency-maximizing "body-count" policy in Vietnam (See Turse,Kill
Anything that Moves), said the firebombing of Tokyo "was a war crime"
(226). Still, Neer limits understanding here, and covers for "his"
side, by omitting any discussion of racism (more on this below), and may only
be more willing to detail US actions because of the distance in time and the
feeling that any action in WWII is justified by Germany and Japan’s unthinkable
criminality. (We might also note that, for example, Zinn, in his history of
the United States, argues that the US was supportive of both German and Japanese
state terrorism and aggression before the two nations made their desperate go-for-broke
bids for empire-extension and colonization-avoidance, and that, in terms of
Germany, as the documentary record illustrates, the US was not motivated by
a desire to save Jewish people.)

Regarding the Korean War, Neer’s method for "justifying" the US’s
use of napalm is to omit literally everything that happened contextually before
North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel, and to act as if the UN imprimatur
for the Western war in Korea was meaningful, and not essentially the US approving
its own war-plans. He does say that China and Russia did not participate in
the UN then (China because it was not allowed and Russia by protest of China’s
exclusion, according to Neer), but he does not explicitly note, as, say, does
Banivanua-Mar in Decolonizing the Pacific, that the UN at this point was simply
a Western colonial (and neocolonial) military alliance utterly dominated by
the United States, with no opposition. Thus, UN imprimatur meant nothing like
what it would mean today, when it is still highly problematic. "UN forces",
as Neer implicitly illustrates at one point, were basically US forces.[i]
On the other issue, Neer has no excuse for omitting everything that happened
before NK troops crossed the 38th parallel because (for other reasons) he cites
Bruce Cumings, whose authoritative seminal study The Korean War: A History points
out that before DPRK (NK) troops entered, the US had itself invented the 38th
parallel by looking at a map and guessing the halfway point. The line was an
arbitrary US creation to serve US interests and tactics, not a Korean one. The
US then propped up a dictator in the South and exterminated one or two hundred
thousand people before the NK troops "invaded" by crossing the US’s
arbitrary line. The troops from the North, like much if not most of the population,
did not accept the artificial division or the US-backed dictatorship that was
exterminating people in the South. Cumings also says the US war on North Korea
constituted "genocide", and says the NK troops empirically, i.e. simply
by the numbers, behaved far better than American or South Korean forces, as
unacceptable as this is to the mind of a fanatically ‘anti-communist’ culture.
Reckoning with the US’s pouring of "oceans of napalm"[ii]on
Korea in this light thus becomes more challenging – even more so if racism is
not omitted, as it also is in Neer’s account. Cumings, by contrast, notes that
Americans referred to "all Koreans, North and South", as "gooks",
and to the Chinese as "chinks". This was part of a "logic"
that said "they are savages, so that gives us a right to shower napalm
on innocents."[iii]

Neer even engages in this a bit himself, demonstrating some of what historian
Dong Choon Kim notes was an attitude of dehumanization of the "other".
Kim writes that the "discourse and rhetoric that US and ROK [South Korea]
elites used dehumanizing the target group (‘communists’) was similar to what
has occurred in … cases of genocide".[iv] Neer,
for example, says, using the US’s self-serving ideological framing, that napalm
"held the line against communism" in the 1950s and then "served
with distinction" in Vietnam – characterizations seemingly intended to
evoke strength, honor, and rightness.

Neer also says China "invaded" North Korea (96). This is false. The
US didn’t like it, but China was invited into North Korea by the DPRK regime.
Unlike the US, China did not cross the US’s 38th parallel. The characterization
of China as invader in this context is also curious given that Neer never once
says the US (or UN) invaded North Korea or Vietnam. US actions are thus never
characterized as invasions, while China’s invited defense of North Korea, which
remained entirely within that territory, is.

Regarding Vietnam, Neer again justifies US action through omission of context
such as the Geneva Accords of 1954[v]and the US’s
own findings that the vast majority of the Vietnamese population supported the
independence/anti-colonial/communist movement that the US was trying to prevent
from holding the nationwide unification vote mandated by the Geneva Accords.
Also interestingly in this chapter, Neer gives his only editorial characterization
of the use of napalm as an "atrocity" – in describing a "Vietcong"
use of napalm, which Neer says the Vietcong barely used – flamethrowers were
a small part of their arsenal. Yet a relatively minor use of napalm by the "Vietcong"
merits a casual editorial value-judgment by Neer as an "atrocity"
while no other action in the text does so.

Neer at one point says that Cuba and the USSR used napalm against "pro-Western
forces in Angola in 1978" (194). In this case, omission is used to condemn,
rather than justify, napalm use, since Neer fails to mention that those "pro-Western
forces", which indeed were pro-Western and US-supported, were Apartheid
regimes massacring black people and trying to maintain openly white supremacist
dictatorships. Thus, when the nature of a regime serves the purpose of justifying
American use of napalm, it is highlighted, but when, if the same logic were
applied, it might "justify" a non-Western use of napalm, the nature
of the regime is imbued with a positive hue as "pro-Western" – thus
implicitly condemning the nonwestern forces’ use of napalm.

One gets virtually zero sense in the book of the prevalence of racism in US
culture during these time periods. It is reduced to a couple of unknown, fringe
civilians making comments in favor of napalm – comments then contrasted with
the more sophisticated producers of napalm, who are characterized as embarrassed
by the ugly racist remarks. The omission of racism stands in sharp contrast
to many other histories of the eras, such as Dower’s history of WWII (War Without
Mercy), in which he notes that an exterminationist ethos towards the Japanese
was present in a minority of the US population generally, but much more prevalent
in elite political circles carrying out the US’s military actions. Dehumanizing
terms like "Jap" and "gook" are thus never mentioned once
in Neer’s text, though they were used all the time. One gets the sense that
Neer feels that including the extent of American racism (even race-law; see
Hitler’s American Model, by Whitman, or The Color of the Law, by Rothstein)
along with his accounts of America blanketing defenseless Asian cities with
napalm would allow an image of the US that, though historically accurate, would
be too unpalatable to be acceptable.

All of this may not be completely surprising given that Neer teaches a course
about US history called "Empire of Liberty", which, for example, includes
two texts by Max Boot, often regarded as a "neocon". I have no issue,
in theory, with taking this position, but if doing so requires omissions as
large as some of those mentioned above, in at least one case even flirting with
genocide-denial, or at least avoidance of the debate, (i.e., completely omitting
US-backed South Korean dictatorship), I start to question the position’s validity.

Overall, though, if one wants to learn about napalm and some things it illustrates
about US history and ideology, this text should certainly be read – in conjunction
with others that give a fuller picture of the reality of the times.

Notes:

[i]Neer notes that
Eighth Army Chemical Engineer Corps officer Bode said that of the approx. 70,000
pounds of napalm being thrown on Korea on "a good day", about 60,000
pounds of this was thrown by US forces. P. 99.

[ii]Cumings,
Bruce. The Korean War: A History. Modern Library. 2011. P. 145.

[v]Neer does
mention other Vietnam-related events in the 1950s, thus giving at least some
broader context.

Robert J. Barsocchini is working on a Master’s thesis in American Studies.
Years serving as a cross-cultural intermediary for corporations in the film
and Television industry sparked his interest in discrepancies between Western
self-image and reality.